Content Marketing that Connects with B2B Buyers

Smartly integrating journalism tactics with content marketing can help you capture the mindshare of prospective business-to-business buyers.

Like marketing, journalism relies heavily on successful storytelling to bring meaning and relevance to audiences. Through a series of compressed statements, journalists try to present the most pertinent facts first to connect with a time-stretched audience. Their end goals may be different, but journalists are similar to marketers in how they try to tell their stories in the shortest way possible.

Embracing the fundamentals of journalism can infuse your business and marketing with enticing content that attracts and connects with your most lucrative customers.

Here are six simple ingredients content marketers can borrow from journalists:

PYRAMID STYLE CONTENT MARKETING

The B2B market is flooded with content and hurried buyers have learned how to tune out irrelevant marketing messages. The best way to beat buyer tune-out is through buyer-centric content that speaks to your target audience’s needs and challenges with rapid, simple directness.

Avoid sending out messages produced for the masses that can be potentially irrelevant. Create content assets that address the specific problems faced by your target personas and offer ways to help. Tell buyers pressed for time upfront exactly why they should consider your solution, company, product, etc.

Used in journalism, the Inverted Pyramid can help organize your content to interest and reel in buyers. This style of writing places the key facts of your brand message in the leading sentence while the remaining supportive and persuasive details follow behind.

According to a recent DemandGen report, “65 percent of B2B buyers strongly agree that B2B vendors should curb the sales messages to improve the quality of their content.”

The inverted pyramid style makes it easier for readers to swiftly skim important facts and receive your main marketing points in the briefest form.

TELL THE USER WHERE TO GO

Once you connect with your audience, it’s time to help direct their buying process. B2B buyers’ time is valuable, so finding the right content at the right time will greatly influence their purchase decision-making.

DemandGen reports “67 percent of B2B buyers rely more on content to research and make B2B purchasing decisions than they did a year ago.”

Generate content that supports their buying decisions and is easily accessible at every stage of the buyer decision path. Most buyers won’t go the lengths to hunt down information; they want solutions to their problems immediately.

Avoid your content getting lost in the noise by providing content that meets a user’s consumption preferences across platforms and devices, and is contextually relevant to the medium.

WRITE WITH NUMBERS

B2B buyers need data to understand your offered solution’s value and compare it to competitors. To justify an expense, you need to help your prospective buyers prove the return of investment to all involved decision-makers.

PROVE AUTHORITY

Demonstrate with your content marketing that you know your reader’s business. B2B decision-makers want to know that you understand their pain points and have client-based case studies documenting how similar issues have been addressed.

B2B marketing relies heavily on building relationships for long-term success. Companies want to be reassured they are working with a like-minded business.

Win organizations over by creating content that demonstrates your industry expertise and reveals what you are all about.

MAKE IT EASY TO RETELL

Like journalism, B2B marketing is built on a foundation of sharing. In B2B marketing, your brand messaging hinges on having your content passed across a chain of B2B decision-makers.

In B2B marketing, marketers must collect the buy-in from a number of different stakeholders within one organization. Accordingly, your story needs to be easy to retell and sell internally. Create content assets that can be pitched easily to prospects’ internal stakeholders.

Deliver the right piece of content to each different stakeholder at the right time and you will be able to move the sale to the closing table.

Enthralling your audience is easy once you incorporate the right elements in your messaging. Using the same journalism writing fundamentals is that first step toward delivering timely, relevant content that B2B buyers crave.

Get started by downloading our FREE B2B content marketing guide below. Get two premium templates that will help guarantee you get the results you deserve in this era of content marketing.